from the money-money-money dept

Honestly, when I first caught wind that Valve was going to suddenly make its platform available for game modders to sell their mods for good old-fashioned money, I initially thought it was great. However, it took only a couple of moments of thinking to realize what a mess this would all be. Taking a modding ecosystem, where talented modders create add-ons and alterations of original games that give gamers exactly what they want, or more of what they want, and injecting money into it represented a misunderstanding of the relationship between modders and gamers, and a failure to understand the gaming community's obvious reaction. Keep in mind that modders already have been making money on Steam, except that they've done so when their mods become desired enough or revered enough to warrant full and separate releases within the game store. This was to be different: modders selling smaller mods within the original game's Steam page. Mods, mind you, help make individual games and entire platforms like Steam more desirable to gamers, also known as Valve's customers. Injecting money this way had what probably should have been easy to predict unintended consequences.

It's not uncommon for people to ask for donations, a nickel or two going clink in the cup, but charging upfront? Definitely not the standard. Some, however, are worried that it could become the norm, not the exception, which would fundamentally alter the mod scene. Mods, they fear (and have, to a small extent, observed), will stop updating for those who don't pay, will abandon mod-centric services like Nexus for Steam's greener pastures.

And:

The feedback wasn't any better on Twitter, where the sentiment expressed seemed to be at its most optimistic when complaining about feelings of abandonment by the modding community, once thought to be simply a faction of the gamer-side of the larger ecosystem and now firmly placed in the sellers category with game-makers, and at its most pessimistic when predicting that Valve's move represents the beginning of the end of modding as a whole. The latter was never true, I'll say, and frankly nobody should be pointing fingers at Valve for this at all. If the market supported paid mods, it would have worked.

It didn't work and part of the reason it didn't does indeed have the tint of an IP issue at its heart. It turns out there was an IP issue over one of the early, if not first, mods offered in Valve's store, with all the accusations of infringement over the work of others that you'd expect — except the issue is between modders and doesn't involve the game-maker at all.

As Destructoid and PC Gamer point out, “Art of the Catch” was created by modders Chesko and aqqh. It also allegedly uses assets from another mod by a modder known as Fore without permission. Fore apparently confronted the Chesko (though, the original comment seems to have been deleted).

If you pay any attention to the modding space, you already know where this is going. It's very common for some mods to incorporate other mods within the larger distribution. This can happen when modders create total conversion mods, where a game is radically changed by implementing a plethora of previously-made mods, or it can happen when the aim of a mod is to drastically change an aspect of the game and a previous mod did part of the work already. What has always happened is that permission was attained to use the mod, credit was given in the release notes of the new mod, and everyone was happy because mods weren't charged for.

Now, we have two modders in a pissing match (though Chesko has reportedly been reaching out to Fore to clear this all up), all due to money exchanging hands. Not only that, but there have been complaints that Steam is punishing users who are raising their voices on the issue. In other words, Valve took a modding ecosystem that was working perfectly well, injected money into it, and the problems arose almost immediately. As for the overall effect these kinds of disputes can have on the modding community? Well, for what it's worth, Chesko is talking about quitting the whole scene entirely, so there's that.

Between that and the general customer reaction to the rollout of this paid mods scheme, it seems clear that Valve never really thought this through. What started off as a Twitter bitch-fest from upset gamers evolved into the kind of protest-comedy only the internet can produce. The end result was Steam's most popular Skyrim mod being a protest against paid mods, allowing characters to carry around a protest placard within the game. And, after the customers and fans had spoken, game developers will have their turn. One of them, Bethesda, makers of the afore-mentioned Skyrim, pulled all paid mods for the game entirely. The public comments from Valve, in conjunction with news that they will offer full refunds on all the Skyrim mods that had already been purchased, don't inspire much confidence, either.

"We've done this because it's clear we didn't understand exactly what we were doing," Valve said in a community update. "We've been shipping many features over the years aimed at allowing community creators to receive a share of the rewards, and in the past, they've been received well. It's obvious now that this case is different...But we underestimated the differences between our previously successful revenue sharing models, and the addition of paid mods to Skyrim's workshop. We understand our own game's communities pretty well, but stepping into an established, years old modding community in Skyrim was probably not the right place to start iterating. We think this made us miss the mark pretty badly, even though we believe there's a useful feature somewhere here."

Look, I don't actually have a problem with modders trying to make money from their work, and I have zero problem with Valve providing a platform for that...I just don't think it will ever actually work. The modding community functions in a way that doesn't benefit from the injection of money-making opportunities for these more modest mods, which are among the most popular. But, as I mentioned at the open, it's not like modders can't make money from Steam. They do, and have. You've probably heard of some of them, like DayZ, or Team Fortress, and The Stanley Parable. All of those games started off as mods (in the case of Team Fortress — now one of Valve's most profitable properties — years before the Steam store even existed) and all of them now have full Steam game pages themselves. The gaming market worked that out on its own.

And you can bet that the smarter game publishers out there aren't going to get on board with allowing paid mods on their Steam pages now that the backlash is in full swing. Mods make games more buy-able, and a negative aspect in the modding community for a particular game isn't something a publisher is going to want to put up with (see: Bethesda).

from the a-mod-too-far dept

I won't pretend to know every in and out of the Dead or Alive series. That's partially because I gave up fighting games once I hit junior high, and partially because my gaming habits tend to cleave to particular franchises generally and DoA wasn't amongst those I patronized. But I gather the series has been mostly about offering up characters, and setting them to beat the hell out of one another for fun and amusement. I can see where there might be fun in that.

"We have to deal with mod issues from an IP holder perspective," Koei Tecmo producer Yosuke Hayashi said in an interview with trade publication MCV. "We would like to ask PC users to play our game in good moral and manner. Otherwise, we won’t be able to release a title for PC again."

Now, is the dedication some modders show to making sure that female characters are disrobed a level 20 on the creepy scale? Sure, I think that's fair. But, from a business perspective, why is Tecmo interested in going the DMCA route on the modding community? Whatever you think of the mods themselves, it's difficult to mount a logical argument for going to war with the modding community, which is typically made up of either a game's fan-base or talented modders serving some portion of the fan-base. Either way, mods are strictly for the interested, meaning they can only make a product more desirable, not less. What good comes from the company trying to hide these mods using intellectual property law?

As for the moral argument, please let me just type "haha" here and imagine I kept repeating those two letters infinitely, because, seriously, c'mon. The DoA series only strayed form its chief thematic vehicle of human beings beating the ever-loving shit out of one another in order to tantalize dumb teenage boys by creating spinoff series in which the female DoAcharacters play volleyball in laughably small bikinis, spinoffs in which the female characters are photographed in laughably small bikinis, and spinoffs in which the female characters can play almost-strip-poker with the player. Let me see if I can draw you a picture of morality using DoA imagery.

The gravity-defying boob physics represent the necessity of a firm moral stance...or something...

The point is that there seems to be little sense in any of this from Tecmo's perspective. Moral arguments are for those with moral authority, and good gaming business is to let modders have-at-it, as it were.

from the facepalm dept

It's an old story: video game is released, modder makes it better, game developer reacts by treating modders like idiots, even though modding makes the original game more attractive for purchase. It's not always this way of course; some game developers are capable of seeing the value in the modding community. Too many, unfortunately, do not. But when a game modder makes a game better and thengets a legal threat from the developer, well, that's just downright stupid.

Dark Souls users on PC have had their lives made infinitely better with modder Durante's DSFix, which serves to fix some of the game's rendering issues. Today, Durante received a rather unpleasant surprise when he was slapped with a copyright infringement notice, seemingly from Bandai Namco. Durante contends on NeoGAF that none of his work specifically infringes on any copyrights, since it doesn't actually use any game code.

Issuing a threat due to a game mod is something of an extension of how Blizzard has behaved in the past. In that case, the issue was going after cheaters within the online gaming community. Wrong as it may have been, there was at least some semblance of good intentions in that case, even if the unintended consequences for copyright caselaw could have been damaging. In this case? Why would a game developer go after a modder who did nothing except make the original game better and more attractive to potential buyers? I don't get it. It appears that some folks working for Bandai Namco aren't sure why this happened either.

Meanwhile, Bandai Namco appears to be taken aback by this, with community manager J. Kartje acknowledging on Twitter that he's actively looking into this situation.

There's been no update from Kartje on the situation since that last tweet, so apparently the "goings on" haven't been "seen" yet, but there are replies to the tweet string that indicate fans would never had made the purchase of Dark Souls for their PC if the mod hadn't been available. One would hope the folks over at Bandai Namco would reign in whoever thought firing off a silly copyright threat was a good idea and make things right with the modder.

from the breating-new-life dept

Earlier this year we talked about how a video game mod, DayZ, breathed new life into a 2 year old game, ARMA 2. This game was not a critical success by any means at release, but because the developer welcomed and made possible the ability for others to mod the game, it recently became one of Steam's best sellers thanks to the popularity of the DayZ mod. Reflecting on this success, the creators of the mod, Matt Lightfoot and Dean Hall, spoke about what creating the mod means for the original game developer and other potential developers.

When asked how ARMA 2 developer Bohemian Interactive felt about the mod, Dean had this to say:

They’re very happy. The sales have been huge, just massive. By our calculations based on player IDs, you’re looking at 300,000 in sales, which is a very significant chunk of total ArmA 2’s sales. So they’re obviously very happy about that and it’s a validation for their strategy and focus with modding.

By embracing the mod culture in video games, the original creators were able to reach out to more gamers and make more money. This is a very powerful tool that game creators can take advantage of. Yet some developers seem to not want it, at all. Very strange. Perhaps as more developers look at successes such as this one, they will learn to be a bit more accommodating to fans.

But what is in it for the modder? Most mods are released for free and so there is little financial incentive to create them. Dean also has something to say on that front:

Yes, I think modding is really good because you go along someone else’s footsteps and you can learn a lot about how someone else has done something. It’s kind of like reverse engineering things. You figure out what they’ve done, how their data structure works, how their engine works and all these other things.

I think it is a really good place to start because you’re using someone else’s framework. If you want to cut your teeth straight in there with C++ I think that’s a lot to chew off and you can end up not getting exposure to all those issues that if you knew them would make a lot more sense when building your engine from scratch or using someone’s toolkit engine from scratch.

As a developer myself, this is something I can certainly attest to. You can learn far more by following and altering existing code than you can by trying to create something on your own. As you become more comfortable with inner workings of the programming languages or other tools you are using, you gain more confidence in your ability to create something from scratch. What better way to promote progress than to provide new developers the ability to learn from your work?

It is really great to see more discussion happening in the games industry about modding—and especially its potential to launch the careers of new developers. We have seen many mods such as Defense of the Ancients, a Warcraft 3 mod, spawn very successful stand alone games, which is a goal that Dean and Matt hope to reach as a result of this very successful mod.

from the externalities-create-value-for-everyone dept

Recently, Mike wrote about the importance of externalities and spillovers in economics, and the fact that it's often best to allow other people to capture pieces of the value you create and build on top of it. Not only does this benefit the economy as a whole, it benefits the originator, because some of the additional value that people create feeds back to them.

In the video game world, a great example of this is when companies open their games up to mods, so users can tweak them or build entirely new games on top of the same basic engine. Valve's Counter-Strike series grew from a fan-made mod for Half-Life, which was so popular it has been credited with keeping Half-Life on gamers' radars for years longer than it would have been otherwise, leading Valve to hire the creators and turn it into its own game, which remains one of the company's most successful titles. This week another example bubbled up on Reddit, in the form of a captioned screenshot of the Steam store titled "Dear developers, this is why you should make your games moddable":

The game ARMA II: Combined Operations was on track to be another mostly-forgotten game, still enjoyed by a small group of fans with few other prospects. Then, two years after its release, and without getting any kind of promotional sale price, it started selling like crazy and surged to the front page of the Steam leaderboards. Why? Another team of developers One of the company's developers released the alpha of a project he'd been working on independently: Day Z, a zombie-survival game built as an ARMA II mod. Fans have been clamoring for a particular type of zombie game for a while now (and Cracked's Robert Brockway pitched a similar idea recently) and the description of Day Z sounds like it fits the bill—so when the free alpha of the mod was released, lots of people bought a copy of ARMA II so they could give it a try. The developer was expecting it to be a hit within the existing fan community, but he had no idea that it would cross over into the mainstream.

In this situation, everybody wins. Gamers get a new game, ARMA II gets renewed sales, Day Z gets to exist (without the need to build a brand new engine). The sales boost to the original might be temporary, or it might spark new interest in the game and revive it entirely, or it might inspire newer and even more popular mods, or... well, there are a lot of possibilities, none of them bad. All because the ARMA II creators had the foresight to let people add value to what they created.

Update: A commenter pointed out that Day Z is the independent project of one of the developers working on ARMA 3. Post has been updated to reflect that fact.

from the shut-down-the-fans-and-they-may-shut-you-down dept

A bunch of folks have been sending in various versions of the story that video game maker Square Enix has forced a fan mod community to shut down a years-long project to create a mod called Chrono Trigger: Crimson Echoes based on the Chrono Trigger world. The game was set to be released at the end of the month before the legal nastygram forced the volunteer fan group to shut down.

It's difficult to fathom how this could possibly make sense. These were fans who were playing up how much they loved the original game universe, and wanted so badly to help spread that, that they spent years developing additional game action, only to have it totally shut down. In an era when treating your fans badly has been shown to backfire badly (especially in the video game world), you would think that Square Enix would have thought twice before sending a legal nastygram threatening huge legal fines.

Once again, this seems like a case where people sent a legal nastygram because they could, not because it was a smart business idea.

from the really-not-so-bad dept

For years, we've been mystified by the "scandal" surrounding the "Hot Coffee" mod in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Here was a game that very overtly included all sorts of violence, killing, carjacking, drugs, robbery, prostitution and general mayhem. And, then someone slips in a modification that adds in some consensual sex? How dare they! Yet, it became a big issue for politicians and lawyers, who eventually worked out a settlement that gives those offended $5. The lawyers, in the meantime, stand to take home $1.3 million. And, now, it turns out that not very many people cared enough to join the settlement. There are probably two reasons for this: (1) most people really weren't particularly offended and (2) $5? ($35 if you actually kept the receipt) Not worth the time. So, once again, we have a situation where a class action lawsuit basically just moves a bunch of money to some lawyers, rather than doing anything useful.